Statements From Nonprofits Challenging The CFC Watch-List Policy
"Although we support efforts to protect nonprofit agencies from unknowingly supporting terrorists or their sympathizers, the actions taken by CFC are misguided and undemocratic."
-- Michael Weekes, Chairman of the Board
National Council of Nonprofit Associations
"Threats of terror aren't the only things affecting U.S. residents. Breast cancer is striking a woman every 2.5 minutes. This horror is compounded by these objectionable requirements. BCA should not be forced to choose between accepting these restrictions and putting federal employees' contributions to good use to help women confronting a life-threatening illness. The CFC requirement imposes a burden on the non-profit community that it should not have to bear."
--Barbara A. Brenner, Executive Director
Breast Cancer Action
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that the people hurt most here are the federal employees who are attempting to give their own money to their favorite charities through workplace giving. The government should not require federal employees or charities to participate in this government blacklist scheme."
--Shari Steele, Executive Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Asking nonprofits to certify their employment against watch lists with significant racial or ethnic profiling components takes this nation back to the kind of policies that led us to round up and intern Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II because of the imagined threat they posed to safety and freedom. The result of the CFC policy will be not to fight terrorism, but the likelihood that CFC charities will refrain from hiring people whose names even sound like names that might be on the government's anti-terrorism lists, with the result of unwarranted discrimination against people with South Asian, Arab, and Muslim names."
--Rick Cohen, Executive Director
National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
"We simply cannot support a policy that compromises our fundamental freedom.""
--Debra L. Ness, President
National Partnership for Women and Families
"It is deplorable that the CFC would attempt to force America's charities to act as police investigators and enforcers, by regularly checking the various government blacklists and reporting anyone appearing to be on the list."
--Kay Guinane, Manager, Community Education Center
OMB Watch
"To require public-minded foundations to institute what amounts to state sponsored private punishment, based solely on the questionable designations of this incautious government, is unconscionable and must be opposed on principle. Surely restraint must be practiced wherever redress is impossible."
--Siobhan Reynolds, President
Pain Relief Network
"We object to the CFC certification which forces charities to choose between two equally repugnant and un-American options: Forego the donations of thousands of caring government workers who contribute greatly to our charitable programs by refusing to make the certification, or check the blacklists to make sure no one doing good works is being smeared by inclusion. This is an objectionable choice in our constitutional democracy and we suggest that the CFC blacklist certification requirement belongs on the trash heap of history alongside similar McCarthy-era impositions."
-- Jeffrey S. Kerr, General Counsel and Director of Corporate Affairs
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Related Links
ACLU Opposes CFC Restriction